onehundred

post 100. i thought i'd share a pair of nicely worded thursday mornings with you.

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3:53am, thu05jan

i was able to follow you

all the way to the sea

you see you left a trail

of mostly neuroses

for which i wrote these songs

long since lost in the trees

i breathed

your scent carried deep

leaving in its wake weak knees

no thirst slaked here,

just a feared naked breeze -

lacking beard insulation,

breaking hard in the freeze

listen to me

(4:08am)

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1:48am, thu12jan

"did it all just get too real?"

your going is unreasoned

basic point-and-run stuff

latitudes wrap you like silk

you're a season to believe in,

you're warm coats on the beach at dawn

i, to the almosts and maybes,

"was it good for me?"

should be; safe journeys to the sea,

to sleep freely in heated relief

i'm the water treaded in the waiting,

i'm a cigarette and a shot of bourbon on waking

(2:05am)

2. auld lang syne

tonight, i worked from 4pm-2am at navy pier. this is my other job, the one where all the meat is already long dead before it gets to my hands, and my job is just to put it together with non-meat stuff and make sure it makes it to the customers - or at least out of the kitchen, having finally leaned sometime recently that i can't really control everything. which is probably for the best.

at around 7:30 i went out for a smoke break, one of my last, as they took away smoke breaks as of 2012 at that job and my other one never gave them in the first place. it's not enough to make me quit smoking. after lighting up and getting about halfway through, i realized i had a text from Mxxxxx asking if i was working. i said yes, and she said to let me know when i had a smoke break. "on one now," i said, and five minutes later she came around the corner and kissed me. she was nearly drunk, out at the billy goat for an hour or two before heading off to a half-dozen other parties for the night. it was the first new year's kiss i'd gotten in years, and i told her so. she kissed me again. it was the first time i'd seen her since october, and it lasted five minutes before i went back to work. "don't be a stranger," i said, holding her face so i could look in her eyes as i said it. "you know my facebook," she said, and that was it. despite the stupid smile on my face when i went back in, i was thinking. i know i haven't made much in the way of moves on her recently, but part of me definitely wanted her to say something about it. maybe that was her way of doing so, i thought, still smiling. she still smells amazing.

about 11:30 i managed to duck out for one last smoke, texting her a "happy new year, you beautiful bitch". an hour later i'd gotten no response, got nervous she'd taken the bitch part seriously (i don't like using 'bitch' to refer to women unless it's really, really accurate), and followed up with, "just kidding, you know i love ya". five minutes later, get a reply that ends, "love you too." haven't heard that in a good few years, either. but did i really mean it, what i said? i didn't know.

later, on an incredibly crowded bus, waiting to pull out of navy pier at 2:30, i messaged her to see what she was doing. turns out, she went to her ex's place (no surprise there, her circle of friends seems to use that house as their main gathering point), where he hit her in the face.

...now, i'm not a particularly violent person. used to get in fights in second, third grade, but who didn't? but, and let me emphasize this, if there is one rule that men should be expected to follow it is that you do not hit women. if you break this rule, your physical well-being becomes forfeit, and you should not be surprised by this. she claimed one of her other friends took care of it, but i'm sure he could still see afterwards, which means it was probably for the best that i wasn't there.

she'd left by the time i heard this, thanked me for the offers of violence, and i didn't hear from her again the rest of the night (though i asked, twice, if she'd like to come by here, and never got a response). hopefully, seeing as it's almost 6am, she's safely asleep somewhere. just like i should be.

...one more time: you do not hit women.

1. lobsters

yesterday, i started work at 7am. i don't often work the morning shifts at this job, and have never pulled the 7am card, had to work my other job starting at 4. so as i trudged out the front door at 6am, waiting for the sun to rise and the rain to lessen, i already knew it would be a long day. the drizzle had become a strong shower by the time i reached work. the walk always takes an hour, and i was well soaked by the end.

after setting up my station in the back room, the chef brought me a box. i popped off the top and was greeting by about a dozen live lobsters.

i'll spare you the details of the process - you can probably look it up on youtube if you're so inclined - but suffice it to say, i learned what color a lobster's brains are, which is something i never wanted to know. i cannot unknow this. i'll also never forget how a lobster hunches its back and crosses its claws when threatened or scared.

i'm not a squeamish person; after being shown the process, i had no trouble replicating all the tears and cracks. the chef assured me they don't feel pain, to which i offered doubt. it wasn't until i got home and relayed the story to my roommates that i realized it was my first time killing a living thing - and not just one, but a full dozen, disassembled, cleaned, and thrown in the fire still twitching. not an insect, not a mouse, but something about the size of a puppy. they were almost cute, i'd think, staring at some of the ones edging their way around the box while dumping various innards into the trash, looking at them while mentally going over the next sequence of cuts and breaks. it's moments like that when i can really cherish having the ability to disconnect from what's going on around me, and if it had happened fifteen or twenty years earlier in life i can imagine it having a pretty large impact on how i'd grown up.

it's not something i particularly want to do again. but, apparently, i can.

stumblestoprepeat

gah, i feel like i've barely written anything of value in the past six months. life keeps getting in the way, and by life i mean work because, well, shit, there's not a hell of a lot goin' on between work, weed, and the web. the three Ws. some of the other connections i was trying to foster have begun to slip. it's frustrating.

i had a train dream, again. they share a lot of similarities - the train is usually only one passenger car and a locomotive, the ride is always shockingly fast and takes us quite a long way, and my fellow riders are always people i've known in my life but presented at ages i never saw. schoolteachers as teenagers, school friends as older men and women than i am now. the ride is always enjoyable, scenic, and at the end i'm always in such a hurry i forget my bags. someone grabs my backpack, but the train inevitably pulls away with my camera still on board. "so be it," i think, and i turn to the surrounding wilderness. i usually find myself at some isolated train station in the woods, with mountains and rivers visible around. no roads, no villages, and it isn't long before i've set off in some random direction and forgotten all about my companions.

c'est la vie, c'est la vie, c'est la vie...

deteriorate

rather than deliberate self-destruction, i seem rather set on letting my body go to shit naturally, without doing much to stand in it's way. me being the clumsy type, there've been enough wounds, injuries, and accidents through the years that, without any of them being particularly major (by my standards), their combined effects are starting to make themselves felt, particularly in the winter. hands, knees, teeth, and eyes, all slowly deteriorating. my writing and cooking days are numbered, as are my days of walking miles back and forth across the city to get to work, and i imagine photography won't be as enjoyable when i can barely see...

c'est la vie. all things are temporary, everything withers and dies. this is not meant to be depressing, or defeatist; it's simple truth. perhaps it feels only right to view and interact with a dying world/culture/civilization via a deteriorating medium.

charlatan

i got a new job. a second job, really; in the winter, a guy like me needs to have two part-time jobs, because when the tourists leave town and the snow rolls in, business drops and hours evaporate. this one is different, though; i'm not serving tourists. suddenly, i'm working directly for the upper class.

charlie trotter was a chef, and he started a restaurant in chicago twenty five years ago which got pretty famous. about six years ago, he opened a fine dining take-out and catering store just around the corner. i sent them my resume off a craigslist ad, they had me come in for an interview, then come back for a few hours of on-the-job work - a stint they have a word for which sounds an awful lot like "stoogin'," which is what sticks in my head and makes me giggle. they had me make what amounted to a potato lasagna, and it turned out looking pretty good. good enough for them to hire me.

by midway through day one, it had become apparent to me (if no one else), that they may have made a mistake. perhaps my resume wasn't examined closely enough - maybe they missed that i never went to cooking school, or that the restaurant i work at is on navy pier. by day three, i was in full-on panic mode; little seizing moments of terror in the midst of things that had me thinking run, run... before someone turns a corner and finds you out, realizes you barely have a handle on what's going on around you, discovers you in the middle of cleaning up some coincidental mishap or another and throws you out on the street. having trotter's on the resume could be a huge deal; what if it worked the other way around? what if they called around, told them how much i suck, polaroid of me next to a giant batch of soup, pile of salt sitting on top, salt shaker still held out, extended, open-ended, screw-off top clearly visible just beneath the hill of salt... "DO NOT HIRE" written beneath in sharpie...

i'm getting better, though. serving rich people is easy - for one thing, there's a hell of a lot fewer of them. a busy day there consists of maybe 30, 40 purchases all day. usually it's more like twenty. it's hard to adjust to not making food to order, though; there are a few things i've had to make consistently, but i have a lot of freedom to make what i want. it's almost a crippling amount of freedom, actually; the first time someone looked at me and said, "okay, go back in the cooler, look around, and figure out a cold salad to make," i was a bit intimidated. but i've started nosing out recipes here and there, and i've had a decent set of people around me to help me out in the right directions.

i'm running out of talkin-steam. point being, i'm aware of a rather large vacuum of confidence inside me as i walk in each day, which fades a bit more with each passing hour. if i keep up this act long enough, keep pretending like i know exactly what i'm doing, i might get away with it - wind up with an awesome job, all because i'm awesome.

hurricanes

i think i once told you what i believed, but we both forgot, so, no harm no foul.

there have been some hurricanes in town tonight. one of them was named mike. the other i might name ralph. or, fuck.